SOURCE: "Early Plays, 1963-1968: Production, Experimentation, 'Learning the Ropes,'" in Maria Irene Fornes and Her Critics, Greenwood Press, 1996, pp. 89-117.

[Kent here explores Fornes' early development as a playwright.]

I just got this obsessive idea, as if you have a night-mare… . Only it was not a nightmare. It was an obsession that took the form of a play and I felt I had to write it.

—Fornes, in Cummings, Yale Theater

Maria Irene Fornes … helped clear a way through the claustrophobic landscape of Broadway vapidity and Off-Broadway ponderous symbolism by making theatre that was fresh, adventurous, casual, fantastic, perceptive, and musical.

—Phillip Lopate, New York Herald

Until age thirty, Fornes was a student of 'life' and the visual arts. But after writing her first play in 1960, she focused on the crafts of theatre production and soon became an active, eclectic member of the 1960s avant-garde, working with groups ranging from the Method-based Actors' Studio to the wildly experimental Judson Poets.

As a new playwright and avid student of theatrical practice, Fornes experimented with old and new dramatic and performative styles, assimilating elements from such models as Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet to her already-developed aesthetic sensibility. While still learning the ropes, she made significant contributions to teaching and producing as well as to playwriting, winning two Obies as well as numerous fellowships and grants… . Although she had only begun writing in 1960, by 1965 she was teaching playwriting at the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York and at drama festivals and workshops (Kuhn 158). As soon as she won the right to direct her own new plays, she incorporated directing into her writing process. After opportunities to produce new plays began to dry up in New York in the late '60s, Fornes ran a playwrights' producing organization.

In her early plays (1963-1968), Fornes experimented with form and genre, and playfully parodied popular entertainment and social conventions. Yet she also infused these otherwise rather generalized satires with a surprising dramaturgical 'reality': closely observed and denaturalized representations of small everyday things (objects, dialogue, actions) and straightforward presentations (almost direct transmission) of dreams, desire, and fantasy. Even in these early works, amidst zany situations and campy musical numbers, Fornes threaded uncanny characterizations of the injustices and inanities that we tend to naturalize, rationalize, or turn into innocuous statistics. Fornes would insist that her quirky presentations are not abstractions, but rather theatrical explorations of the "surrealism" of how other people, those "outside our circle of friends," choose (or are forced) to conduct their lives (in Marx 8).

In this chapter I chronicle Fornes' genesis as a playwright and analyze her published plays from the 1960s. I pay special attention to plays such as The Successful life of 3 and Promenade which are often omitted from feminist reviews of her work because they contain baffling or possibly sexist images and are difficult to categorize. I hope to shed light on these early plays by replacing them into the context of Fornes' development as a playwright and of the venues in which they were created and/or produced. Although Fornes functions as a bard/jester throughout her oeuvre by staging contradictions and unsettling assumptions, in these early plays she is clearly working as a jester/satirist, pointing up society's ills and illogic but refraining from overt recommendations. (In her later work, she becomes increasingly the jester/judge, warning her audiences of the interwoven consequences of personal and social relations.)

From 1954-1957, Fornes lived in Europe. Originally intending to paint in an isolated Spanish fishing village, but after less than a week she moved to Paris and from there made short excursions throughout Europe (Harrington 34). Although Fornes continued to work at painting, she recalls:

my painting had never really reached a personal depth for me. Painting, I always had to force myself to work. I never found that place where you're touching on something vital to your own survival, to your own life.

(in Cummings 52)

However, while living in Paris, she chanced to see the original 1954 Roger Blin production of Waiting for Godot. She found the play to be "the most powerful thing of all—not only in theater but in painting, film, everything!" (in Betsko 155). Even though she "didn't understand enough French to know what was being said, [she] understood the world, the sphere in which it took place. [She] got the rhythm" (Harrington 34). Seeing the Parisian production of Endgame confirmed Beckett as a model for her:

Imagine a writer whose theatricality is so amazing and so important that you could see a play of his, not understand one word, and be shook up. When I left the theater I felt that my life was changed, that I was seeing everything with a different clarity.

(in Cummings 52)

However, she did not immediately begin writing but worked as a textile designer upon her return to New York in 1957.

In the winter of 1957-1958, she saw an adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses in Nighttown (directed by Burgess Meredith with Zero Mostel),¹ which most impressed her because it was staged in a place on West Houston "not ordinarily used as a theatre" (in Savran 55). To this day, Fornes' playwriting and directing reveal her painterly sensitivity to the deployment of space; she often instructs actors to hit precise blocking marks at key moments (although sometimes such directions also allude to and gently parody familiar movie shots). For example, in Night she directed an actor to finish his fall on a precise mark so that when his scene partner kneels to comfort him, they will be framed by a romantic "special" (light). But whether film-based or not, Fornes stages every scene with the care of a designer; she attends to the symbolic and psychological effects of positioning, color, and visual weight. Designing images and directing actors as elements of design are as integral to her creative process as scripting dialogue.

The formative play-going experiences mentioned above eased Fornes' transition from painting to writing by showing her the communicative power of visual and environmental aspects in theatre and the immense potential for creating striking effects by experimenting with these elements. Although direct references to her art study occasionally appear in her work, such as the turbulent sky backdrop for Nadine (1989) inspired by a Hans Hofmann painting, Fornes' artistic background is more consistently evident in memorable theatrical images intended to arrest audience attention, even if they do not fully understand the import or allusions of the accompanying text.

Fornes actually began writing in 1960 with a challenge to then-roommate Susan Sontag, "How silly! If we want to write, why not sit down and write?" And so they did. They continued to write regularly, and for about six months, Fornes and Sontag read and criticized work with a group of friends (Harrington 34). Although influences between lifelong associates are difficult to determine, and in this case we know that Fornes reads very little while Sontag has kept abreast of Fornes' new work, in the 1960s Fornes and Sontag shared an interest in camp, parody, and popular culture.²

After struggling as a painter and then trying her hand at short stories, Fornes found in playwriting a suitable outlet for her imagistic, conversational creativity (Harrington 34). Her first finished play, The Widow (1961), was based on her translation of letters "written to my great-grandfather from a cousin who lived in Spain" (in Betsko 155). And though this play was produced in New York, broadcast in Mexico, and won two writing awards, Fornes was still reworking it in 1966 and did not include it in her first published anthology, Promenade and Other Plays (1971).

Fornes made her avant-garde play writing debut in 1963 with Tango Palace (originally There! You Died), which premiered at the San Francisco Actor's Workshop under the direction of Herb Blau. She had become pleasurably obsessed with the writing of Tango Palace:

It came out of nowhere—almost like a dream… . When the idea came to me I stayed home for 20 days and only left the house to go buy something to eat… . I slept with the typewriter next to me.

(in Harrington 34)

Writing it was the most incredible experience. A door was opened which was a door to paradise.

(in Savran 55)

Tango Palace charts the existential struggles between Isidore, an "androgynous" master/teacher, and his/her earnest young captive Leopold, a reluctant student and follower. They engage in a series of nasty Beckettian games during which Leopold is rewarded with blows. Isidore's seductiveness and cruelty, his/her insistence on master/slave narratives, and the highly theatrical use of props and scenarios (such as a tango, a duel, and a bull-fight) are reminiscent of Genet. While the play makes no direct references to feminism, Fornes' exploration of seduction and the entrapment of an unwilling object of desire would interest many feminists. Fornesian hallmarks include an ironic view of interpersonal relations, an interest in language use, and the portrayal of characters who strive (often unsuccessfully) to free themselves from oppressive situations.

Isidore constantly flips cards at the unwilling 'student' that contain the sentences and phrases of their previous dialogue. Isidore insists that if Leopold will only memorize the cards, he will never hesitate nor be short of an answer, a question or "a remark, if a remark is more appropriate" (Tango 134). Through Leopold's refusal to "learn that way," Fornes criticizes rote education. This is also her first play which warns against the deadening effect that a reliance on set phrases and concepts produces in speakers, impeding their ability to express themselves and to connect with others.³

In Tango Palace, the struggle ceases only when Leopold kills Isidore rather than emulate his teacher's "rottenness," but in the last scene of the play, Isidore reappears as a challenging angel and Leopold, sword in hand, steps forward to resume their battle on the next plane. Despite this circular (or perhaps spiraling) 'conclusion,' Fornes does not expect audiences to be disheartened but radier energized, as she had been by Franz Kafka's The Trial and Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Pozzo beats on Lucky and at the end Lucky doesn't get free, but it doesn't matter because I do! I've never been anybody's slave but when I see that I understand something. Josef K. may get guillotined or go to the electric chair but, rather than saying "I'm doomed," I learn from his behavior.

(in Savran 56)

Likewise, Fornes hopes that audiences will learn something about themselves and human relations from watching the trials of her combatants. Their battle resumes on the next plane, because Fornes sees life as a series of confrontations which challenge people to make decisions and to keep struggling.

A number of Fornes' plays end with frustrated characters trying to 'shoot' their way out of some sort of emotional and physical entrapment or dilemma.⁴ Since Fornes does not advocate violence as a good solution, it may be that she wants to examine the conditions under which low-power 'victims' become capable of striking out in order to free themselves. Perhaps then Leopold must confront Isidore again (though not in the same situation and probably not in a setting so fully controlled by Isidore) in order to struggle towards a better understanding of his entanglement with Isidore (his complicity perhaps) and to find a better solution. In addition, the seeming imbalance between Leopold's entrapment in unfamiliar contexts (which could be read as a judgment that society and social relations cannot be changed) is balanced by Fornes' next play, The Successful Life of 3, in which characters are placed in an anarchistic universe in which they are only constrained to the extent that they willingly obey social conventions and the wishes of others.

As Tango Palace begins, Isidore's domineering behavior seems extreme, even absurd. But as the play proceeds, Fornes' hunch about "the relationship between a mentor of some sort and a student" (in Betsko 158) evolves into a psychologically realistic critique of the dynamics of master-student relations (especially in the arts) during those years just before widespread student revolt against educational policies. Like a poet-prophet, Fornes often pinpoints such tensions and contradictions before they fully erupt in the society at large. Until recently, she assumed that her (largely "privileged poor" bohemian and liberal middle-class) audiences were with her, or at least not far behind, in their perceptions of social dynamics, an assumption less and less true the farther she has worked from the New York avant-garde. This gap or delay between Fornes' vision and audience perception may be responsible in part for the delay of wider acceptance and understanding of her later plays until several years after they premiere. Her growing recognition of mis problem may in part explain the more individualized characters and more explicit rendering of social contexts in her later work.

Tango Palace was a highly successful and personally rewarding premiere. Fornes was pleased with the directing and acting of the San Francisco production, and she received an Office for Advanced Drama Research (OADR) playwriting grant to polish the script for the second volume of Arthur Ballet's anthology, Playwrights for Tomorrow. The play also won her a place in the Prentice-Hall literature anthology, Concepts of Literature (1966), "among writers like Aristotle and Shakespeare and you can imagine … when you have a first experience like this, you're always looking to repeat it" (in Savran 58).

Under the auspices of the OADR, Fornes wrote and directed The Successful Life of 3: A Skit for Vaudeville which was presented on a double bill with Tango Palace in January 1965 at The Firehouse, an avant-garde venue in Minneapolis. As soon as she returned to New York, the Open Theatre staged The Successful Life as part of its 1964-1965 production season at the Sheridan Square Playhouse (Life 163). However, Richard Gilman (theatre critic and Open Theatre affiliate) as well as most company members "were unhappy with [Chaikin's] production of the play," which they felt had not done "justice to Miss Fornés' imagination and dramatic powers" (Gilman, in Promenade and Other Plays 1). In his restaging, Gilman presented Fornes as "a kind of radical parodist" by foregrounding her "sense of the incongruities and discontinuities of language" (1). Gilman's production, which emphasized Fornes' "fruitfully illogical" depictions of "social inanity" (1), won Fornes an Obie; soon after, the play was produced overseas and published in two anthologies (Nasso 244).

Even though the play premiered in Minnesota, New York critic Bonnie Marranca claims that The Successful Life of 3 "reflects the early Open Theatre approach to drama," because the play's "many changes in character, mood, and situation, and its completely exteriorized (unemotional) and abstract approach to human behavior" were well-suited to the "transformation" techniques then popular at the Open Theatre (Marranca, Playwrights 56). However well the play was eventually served by Open Theatre actors, Marranca's implication of one-way influence belies the genesis of the piece and Fornes' relationships with several divergent theatre groups, in particular the Actors' Studio, the Open Theatre, Judson Poets' Theatre, and New Dramatists.

The Actors' Studio, begun in 1949, was a place where actors could hone their skills under the direction of Method director/teachers, such as Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and (in the 1960s) Lee Strasberg, all veterans of the Group Theatre (Henderson 274). From 1931 to 1941, Group members sought to emulate the Moscow Art Theatre's naturalistic style of acting by living and working together; their resulting American interpretation of early Stanislavski technique became known as the Method (274). As disseminated by the Actors' Studio, the Method style has been characterized as "unconventional, deeply felt, and psychologically detailed," "more impulsive than calculated and more openly emotional than intellectual" (186). Despite the obvious stylistic differences between Fornes' early experimental works and typical Method vehicles by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, Fornes shared with Strasberg a desire to discern and convey psychological truths and to stage behaviors motivated by impulse and emotion rather than by conscious logic and cool rationality.

In the mid-1960s, Fornes observed scenework at the Actors' Studio to familiarize herself with actor/director relationships and the rehearsal process. She also took Method-based classes at Gene Frankel's school: beginning acting, which included sensory exercises, and directing, "which just means you get the experience of not knowing what to say to an actor … [which] you might as well go through at school" (52). Although Fornes recognized their aesthetic differences from the outset and would "completely ignore" Strasberg's comments about aesthetics, she was "very impressed with Strasberg's work as an actors' … [and] directors' technician" (in Cummings 52). Nonetheless, Fornes' exposure to Method principles changed her writing style:

My writing became organic. I stopped being so manipulative. In Tango Palace, I felt I knew what needed to happen in a scene and that the writing was serving me. You can see the moments when a character is speaking for my benefit rather than from their own need.… I [began] applying the Method technique for the actor to my writing and it was bringing something very interesting.

(52)

But it was also while working with new directors at the Actors' Studio that Fornes had her first clashes over the traditional separation between the director's and the playwright's role in producing new plays. Even though she was invited to rehearsal, she was forced to silently note her reactions to the acting and direction and discuss them with the director outside rehearsal (52). Fornes' experience confirmed Lanford Wilson's warning about playwrights' traditionally submissive position in rehearsal. He had explained to her that the playwright is treated "like a girl … [who has] to be nice to this guy [the director] who is going to … choose the right actors for my play because … I am very talented, but I don't really understand anything" (in Betsko 160). Such rude introductions to general theatre practice notwithstanding, Fornes had a more satisfying and fruitful experience with the 'conventional' Actors' Studio than with one of their most notable challengers, the Open Theatre.

In 1963, a group of actors and writers dissatisfied with Method acting, naturalistic plays, and Broadway commercialism formed the Open Theatre (OT) in order to develop a new, more physical or "external" acting style (Poland lxi; Henderson 167). Many members had been students of Nola Chilton, a Method teacher who "had evolved a series of exercises designed to prepare the actor for performing in absurdist dramas where the usual techniques of psychological preparation seemed inappropriate" (Bigsby 98). Joseph Chaikin, a former Chilton student and Living Theatre actor who soon dominated the OT, ran a workshop through which he hoped to "redefine the limits of the stage experience" (Roberts 503-504). He orchestrated physical and vocal exercises and improvisations in discussion with observers, including non-member affiliates such as Gilman, Gordon Rogoff, Paul Goodman, and Susan Sontag (Fornes' former roommate and lifelong colleague) (Malpede 185).

Although Chaikin would have preferred to focus exclusively on non-performative workshops, at the urging of Gilman, the Open Theatre performed short plays and improvs at the end of 1963, and in 1964-1965 mounted a season of "ten plays, from Brecht's Clown Play and T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes to works by [Jean Claude] Van Itallie and Maria Irene Fornes" (101). Except for this atypical season, playwrights who joined the Open Theatre were expected, as "integral participants in the group experience," to submit text for improvisation rather than present finished scripts (Poland lxi).

Fornes joined the OT in late 1963. Although she "found their work interesting," she had expected to be "much more active, that Joe would be more interested in [her] ideas … [but she soon] realized that they were interested in doing whatever it is they were going to do" (Interview). When she made comments about works in progress "that [she] thought would improve things, they were ignored; so [she] continued to go and just watch and hang around" (Interview). For example,

Joe and Jean-Claude Van Itallie [the OT's principal playwright and Chaikin's companion] were working on "The Airplane Piece." It was an attack on the 'Powers that Be' … in which a plane crashes but the people in 1st class are protected. And I said that the theory may be right in other things but that in those days airplanes usually crashed head first and since 1st class is in the front, it doesn't work for this thing. And he just ignored me. He was not interested in being accurate. How can he be interested in having a symbol that's incorrect! … I felt that [at the OT] there was a lot of principle and a lot of political ideas, but they were so fuzzy around the edges. I didn't like that. Of course, I also didn't like the fact I was not treated respectfully.

(Interview)

Given her feelings about the feminization and disempowerment of playwrights, Fornes was not satisfied with Chaikin's general method of using playwrights' work like found text, extracting as little as one sentence or phrase from a scene or play, sometimes only for its aural rhythm, and making it the basis for his guided improvisations. However, she did share Chaikin's belief that good theatre is a "controlled experience, that it must transcend privatism, and that the intuitive must remain subordinated to a central intelligence provided by the writer and the director" (Bigsby 103). But in practice they differed sharply because Chaikin only truly shared the directorial role wim Van Itallie, while Fornes was already beginning to make directing part of her playwriting process. Like a number of actors who left the OT to escape Chaikin's "necessary tyranny" (100), Fornes drifted away from the OT and toward the more democratic, chaotic, and for her, "heavenly" Judson Poets' Theatre (Interview).

In relation to The Successful Life of 3, Fornes disagreed with both Strasberg's and Chaikin's belief that Method techniques were only suited for 'naturalistic' theatre: "A method actor should be able to work in a play of O'Neill as well as Ionesco as well as Shakespeare… . What you need is to be aesthetically aware, and to understand that imagination is a part of natural life" (in Cummings 53). As discussed in Chapter 2, Fornes' belief that imagination along with dreams and visions are "a part of natural Ufe" coincides with the magical-realist worldview. Given this belief and her particular experiences with the Actors' Studio and the Open Theatre, it is less ironic that Fornes describes The Successful Life of 3 as the first play that "was influenced by my understanding of Method" (52). "What one character says to another comes completely out of his own impulse… . The other character's reply never comes from some sort of premeditation on my part or even the part of the character" (52). Fornes adapted Strasberg's "moment-to-moment" work (not anticipating lines and reactions by focusing on the moment rather than the outcome of the scene or story) in order to restrain her analytical urges until after she had gained access to the sort of creative energy that had produced Tango Palace.

In The Successful Life of 3, 3, an intensely curious and randy middle-aged man, worms his way into a permanent threesome with SHE, a sexy young lady, who handles difficult questions by stopping to "think with a stupid expression" and HE, a handsome and disdainful young man to whom SHE is married for ten of the play's sixteen years (Life 165). Serious moral questioning of sexual promiscuity and media stereotypes as well as narrative links between the cartoonlike vignettes are suspended in order to highlight the vagaries of conversational logic, sex and marriage, and masculine rivalry.

Fornes' terse scenes with their rapid shifts in interpersonal dynamics were well-suited to "transformational" acting techniques in which the character, setting, and tone of one scene abruptly transforms into an entirely different emotional and behavioral texture in the next. Yet the characters in The Successful Life, however erratic and superficial they seem compared to their naturalistic counterparts, show more continuity and individual development than typical transformational characters and the continuing 'evolution' of two of her three characters provides much of the interest in Fornes' play.

The title of The Successful Life of 3 points up Fornes' double-edged interest in 3's nonconformist method of succeeding in Ufe. On the one hand, the play celebrates 3's facility for flouting social strictures and making his way in the world as it is; on the other hand, this satire exposes the kind of anarchistic opportunism necessary to survive in a world in which 'free' enterprise, aggressive marketing, and self-promotion carry the day. Most interesting from a feminist point of view, however, are the changes in SHE. For the first half of the play, SHE acquiesces in having sex with 3 whenever he mentions it, raising "too many" children and eternally peeling potatoes as HE'S wife; in short, doing 'what women are supposed to do.' Later in the play, SHE leaves both HE and 3 to go to the movies and marries the theatre owner only to return when 3 has made a pile of money. Eventually, she comes 'home' for good, declaring that "I'm too old and tired and I've had too many men. I'm just going to sit here and rest for the rest of my life" (Life 196). Even in this early comedy, Fornes draws attention to women's traditionally constrained freedom of choice and creates a character who asserts herself in order to improve her life.

Within this 'playing space,' Fornes manages to broaden a comic type, the 'dumb sexy broad,' by moving SHE through a series of sexual/marital relationships in which (without stretching the intellectual capabilities of the character) SHE learns from her experiences and enters middle age resolutely celibate. Fornes allows SHE to move from the status of object through constrained agency to an equal partnership with the men. With pointed irony, Fornes arranges for this journey from object to agent to be accomplished not by an exceptional woman, but by an ordinary 'dumb broad.'

In addition, Fornes uses the constant switches in character and situation to explore differing (power) relations between women and men. By discarding naturalism's tendency to reproduce accepted stereotypes of gendered roles, transformations opened up a, possible space for female characters to act as agents and even to be in situations where they are equal to or more powerful than male characters. This 'creative playing space' (in Ruddick's sense of the term)⁵ was more easily opened up in the production as well as the writing because actors and directors (as well as the playwright) were freed from trying to represent round, 'authentic' male and female characters that a naturalistic linear plot would seem to require.

By looking at The Successful Life as a series of status games, it becomes apparent that HE, the young attractive white male, has most to lose and that SHE, the acquiescent sex object, has most to gain; from the very beginning 3 establishes himself as an unconventional character who gets what he needs. From the first scene, paunchy, ordinary-looking 3 horns in on HE'S privileged access to desirable females. HE marries SHE and becomes a "husband and father" in name only as it is 3 who does "all the screwing and make[s] all the money" (Life 183). Notably, it is SHE who is first referred to by a personal name, "Ruth." Only quite late in the play is 3 referred to as Arthur and in both cases, he is being scolded, first for being a thief and then for being mean. HE, the stereotypical leading man and protagonist, never achieves a personal name, and by adhering to the most rigid code of acceptable social behavior for his "role" (chasing desirable women, settling down as a husband and father, reluctantly getting a job), HE loses out. 3 achieves higher status by questioning assumptions, taking risks, and going directly for what he wants. SHE gains highest status in the end by moving from desired object to active seeker of her own enjoyment, and by setting rules and limits on her interactions with others.

Fornes returns to this scenario of a 'dumb woman' living with two equally limited men in her more serious later play, Mud (1983), in which categorizations of victim and oppressor, manipulated and manipulator are complicated by changes in the fortunes of the three characters. The Successful Life also contains glimpses of interpersonal dynamics and bits of dialogue that reappear as late as 1990 in Nadine. Upon re-examining these texts, I believe this fore-shadowing signals Fornes' persistent interest in familial, economic, and sexual relations that do not conform to the 'American social norm' of the monogamous heterosexual middle-class couple with two children. In fact, many of Fornes' plays consider the variety of ways in which people form households, make a living, speak to one another, and assimilate elements of popular culture (e.g., movies, social dancing, bullfights, jokes, and fashion shows). In The Successful Life, characters, who are themselves living in an implausible filmic world, frequently view and refer to movies and movie characters. They live in a menage á trois, work as a store detective, an "Alec Guinness type gangster" (190), or Zorro, and speak in jokes, puns, and non sequiturs.

In this two-dimensional comedy, Fornes points out that middle-class people are often most noticeably constrained by their own acceptance of societal mores; or in other words, that people often participate in their own constraint or domination. In The Successful Life, no one is forced by violent action or words or by serious legal compulsion to submit to the others' wishes. In fact, the only violent act is committed by 3, a private citizen against a policeman. (Once HE and 3 have given up their rivalry and accepted their triangular relationship with SHE, and the police no longer serve to remove first one and then the other rival for SHE'S attention, 3 blithely shoots a policeman whose entrance threatens to disturb their now-comfortable threesome.) Early in the play, SHE consents, albeit without thorough consideration, to perform her 'womanly duties'; her life begins to change only when SHE/Ruth leaves, chooses other partners, refuses menial chores, and sets the conditions under which she will return to a relationship with HE and 3. The men do nothing to force or even dissuade her once she has stated a firm decision. Both 3 and SHE gain status by taking risks and flouting social mores, and though they soon tire of their new ventures, they return with the experiential knowledge to make new decisions.

The show ends with all three characters singing a paean to ignorance: "O let me be wrong, but oh not to know it." It is a very knowing ignorance (and certainly not innocence) that Fornes' characters are promoting. The lyrics might be paraphrased, O let us arrange our affairs in our own unconventional ways without encountering any compelling reasons not to proceed according to our perceived needs at the moment.

Fornes reports that The Successful Life of 3 started when she heard a conversation in her mind between an actor she knew and another unfamiliar man. "That caught my imagination completely. I wrote the play in two weeks" ("Messages" 29). But such spontaneous inspiration could not always be counted on, and Fornes began seeking ways to be "possessed again" (in Savran 58).

Thus, Fornes' most widely acclaimed play of the 1960s, the campy-satiric musical Promenade (1965, music by Al Carmines), resulted from a card game she devised to keep her analytic mind busy and out of the way of her creativity. She inscribed index cards with character types and settings, then shuffled the cards and laid out one card for characters and one for setting. When she dealt "aristocrats" and "prison" and found this pairing incongruous, she knew right away that in the first scene of Promenade the prisoners would dig a hole and escape (in Cummings 29). The prisoners' journey to an aristocratic party, the scene of a car accident, a park, a battlefield, and eventually back to jail was dictated by the 'hand' of settings Fornes dealt herself.

This exercise is reminiscent of composer John Cage's and choreographer Merce Cunningham's aleatory techniques. For example, Cunningham would set the direction and sequence of a dance by following the pattern created by throwing Chinese sticks; he and Cage presented concerts in which music and dance that had been created independently of each other were performed at the same time. However, Fornes introduced chance not so much to replace linear narrative with abstract form but rather to make way for irrational, fantastic ideas and images that her conscious mind tended to censor—a goal Fornes shared with San Francisco choreographer Ann Halprin, who sought to imbue modern dance with the "freedom to follow intuition and impulse in improvisation" (Banes 1983, xvii). In the early 1960s, a group of younger choreographers (who formed the Judson Dance Theatre collective) extended Cunningham's and Halprin's experiments by integrating everyday movements, objects, and costumes with play and random activity. They found a congenial (and rent-free) place to rehearse and show their work at Judson Church in Greenwich Village. Fornes shared the Judson dancers' view that traditional "methods, techniques, and definitions that were once avant-garde … [are now raw material] to be sampled, borrowed, criticized, subverted" (xv). Therefore, it is not surprising that Promenade also found an audience and an enthusiastic production team at the Judson Church.

The young Reverend Al Carmines, resident composer and advocate for the arts, inspired the congregation at Judson to make their Washington Square church a place where artistic experimentation would be unencumbered by "the usual rules of approval and disapproval" (McDonagh 1970, 97). The congregation voted to refrain from censoring artistic work because of language or form; they agreed that all work must "be allowed to grow and flourish in order that any might survive" (97). This ethos also produced a community audience at Judson who took a "passionate, prejudiced, and proud" interest in all the artists who worked at the Church and who were remarkably receptive to "the bizarre" (97). The cross-fertilization between the various arts housed under one friendly roof resulted in Judson Dance members choreographing movement passages for Judson Poets' Theatre productions, and in Fornes serving as a resident costume designer for Judson from 1965-1971. It was also at Judson that Fornes had enjoyed the sensuous, multimedia Happenings of Jim Dine and Claus Oldenburg (Harrington 34).

Produced in 1965, Promenade may well have been "the apotheosis of the Judson style" (Marranea, "Playwrights" 58), with its trenchant wit and obtuse humor, zaniness and high camp characterizations. Artistic director Carmines provided a richly melodious score of thirty-two numbers, ranging from German cabaret and torch songs to parodies of musical comedy and operetta, for Fornes' amusing and sometimes baffling lyrics and rather slight book. Looking at it from the aesthetic side (as Marranea does), Fornes' triumph lies in entertaining her audience with "an insane wonderful story that is even moralistic!" (57).

The story follows prisoners 105 and 106 after they escape from the buffoonish jailer who is too busy exacting sexual payment from female visitors to notice that the inmates are digging out. The escapees attend a high-class party during which the idle rich sing paeans to unrequited love and infidelity, and the ladies jump out of their dresses in imitation of Miss Cake, the full-bodied consort of the boorish Mayor/Warden. When the insouciant Servant is caught mocking these inane pastimes, Mr. S puts her in 'her place':

It's sad your career depends on our whim.
On with your work, my dear, or you'll get thin.
You see, even if you're here, and we're also here,
You are not near, isn't that clear?
                                     (Promenade 211)

Before leaving the party, 105, 106, and the Servant steal all the valuables from the drowsing overfed aristocrats.

When the trio comes upon a man injured by a hit-and-run driver, Fornes gives us a commedia-style lazzo in which the prisoners put their numbered jackets frontwards and backwards on the injured man. When the stupid jailer 'finds' his suspect(s) and carts the injured man off to jail in their stead, they sing the song "Clothes Make the Man," comically inverting the usual snobby implications of the adage. Next, 105 and 106 encounter their Mother who has been looking for her infants for years and who does not recognize them as adults. They respond by singing:

It's to age that we owe what we are.
In fact, we're grateful for the passing of time.
                                                    (234)

Phyllis Mael is partially right that in Promenade "social criticism is evident but attenuated by the absurdity of its presentation" (190). Nevertheless, Fornes' facility for imaging social ironies is already evident in these early plays. In the battlefield scene, badly injured working-class soldiers discuss how they were conscripted into serving as cannon fodder. Despite falling bombs, the rich continue their moveable feast among the carnage. After the Mayor has called the wounded men to attention for review by their 'betters,' the party-goers callously unwind the soldiers' bandages and proceed to use both gauze and soldiers in an oblivious Maypole dance, while the Mother tries unsuccessfully to stop them. After the rich wander off leaving the waging of the (Vietnam?) war to the lower classes, the Mother and the Servant cradle the wounded men in a double piéta.

Having exposed the rich and powerful as social parasites, Fornes turns our attention to how the oppressed survive in an unfair world. The newly healed soldiers persuade the other workers to take advantage of the aristocrats' free wine and entertainment. The Mother, who "has been sad ever since [she] pitied a despicable man," displays an ambivalent reaction: she distances herself from the destitute man, thanking God that she "is better than he is," but also acknowledges that "there are many poor people in the world, whether you like or not" and wishes that she could go to a place "where a human being is not a strange thing" (265). The Servant goes off to think about what she has learned, having nearly succumbed to the seductions of material possessions, which she had originally donned in order to demonstrate that "riches make you dumb" (238-240). 105 and 106 come to the most poignant and frightening conclusion:

When I was born I opened my eyes,
And when I looked around I closed them;
And when I saw how people get kicked in the head,
And kicked in the belly, and kicked in the groin,
I closed them. I closed them.
My eyes are closed but I'm carefree.
                                                (254)

I disagree with Bonnie Marranea's opinion that the prisoners, 105 and 106, are "total innocents … [who] turn their backs on the rich and their riches, and the cruelties of life" and who find "'freedom' in their cells" and in their "'rich' inner lives" (Playwrights 56). On the contrary, Fornes offers for consideration the prospect of prisoners 'choosing' willful ignorance to avoid witnessing the domination and abuse of the poor. In these examples, Fornes demonstrates how peers influence one another to conform to their class positions by accepting the 'generosity' of the rich, by setting themselves above and apart from their 'less fortunate' neighbors, by aping the wealthy, or by closing their eyes and "being carefree." In other words, Fornes exposes some of the workings of habitus in maintaining and reproducing class divisions.⁶

But since Fornes' audiences are not comprised primarily of either the wealthy or the working poor, most of the lyrics, in the prisoner's song for example, are aimed at "privileged-poor" bohemians and the middle-classes who (collectively) have the resources and knowledge to change social relations. When the prisoners sing "A poor man doesn't know where his pain comes from.… A poor man's life is sour and he doesn't know who made it so" (253), Fornes is asking the audience to open their eyes and to recognize structural social inequalities and the pain and waste they cause. She appeals to her audience to side with the poor against the "madmen" who "feel sure" only about "stupid things … money, power, adulation":

I know what madness is
It's not knowing how another man feels
A madman has never been
In another man's shoes

Madness is lack of compassion
                                             (254).

Here Fornes targets the consciences of her particular audience—people willing to pay to watch her aesthetically challenging and politically complicated works. In answer to David Savran's suggestion that the 'victims' in her play, The Conduct of Life are complicit in their own oppression, Fornes responded that it is not the responsibility of the most oppressed to bring about social change but of those like herself, her audiences, and the interviewer, who "have the knowledge, the intelligence, the perspective … [to] know what's right and what's wrong … [and] what's possible" (in Savran 69). Although I believe that Fornes is reacting against middle-class complacency and the convenient notion that fundamental social change can come only from the most oppressed classes, at times her statements seem to betray little faith in the knowledge and capabilities of oppressed people. Such ambiguity also appears in the lyric "A poor man doesn't know where his pain comes from" but as we will see throughout her oeuvre, Fornes' depiction of the strength and striving of extremely limited characters seems to undercut these hints of condescension. Although delivered in an easy-to-swallow, if zany, cabaret-style vehicle, the social and political issues introduced in Promenade will be revisited in harsher, darker, and subtler form throughout Fornes' works into the 1990s.

Promenade returns in the end to its predominantly light and ironic tone with a full cast lullaby, "All Is Well in the City":

All is well in the city,
People do what they want.
They can go to the park.
They can sleep all they want.
And for those who have no cake,
There is plenty of bread.
                                         (266)

Here, Fornes pokes fun at the anaesthetizing closure of musical comedies while at the same time exposing for consideration a singularly American version of the palliative ascribed to Marie Antoinette, who faced much more strenuous unrest than most people could discern in the United States when Promenade premiered in 1965.

In this piece, Foraes walks the line between mere entertainment, avant-garde obscurity, and didacticism, and does so with bardic aplomb. Readily apparent is her tribute to and subversion of movies and popular entertainment from the 1920s and '30s: the vaudeville turns, the lazzi of mistaken identities, the torch songs about cruel-hearted lovers and unfulfilled desires. Her sympathy for those who must serve the boorish wealthy and who are disciplined by then-henchmen is easily accessible and perhaps made a bit too palatable by bright music and comic approach. And like the Servant, who finds herself dangerously attracted to the wealth she would eschew, Fornes risks reinvoking the gender and class stereotypes of the popular forms she satirizes. When I first saw the illustration of a buxom nude woman jumping out of a cake which graces the soundtrack record jacket and listened to the song, "Four Naked Ladies," I was dismayed (as I imagine other feminists might be). However, on closer examination, I found Miss Cake to be an intriguing character, part rebel and part accomplice to the smarmy Mayor. In her quirky song of seduction, Miss Cake dares the men to love a full-figured mature woman:

Let the fruit ripen on the tree
For if not, the meat will harden.
I'm the peach of the west.
Chicken is he who does not love me …

For there's more to the cake than the icing. A morsel I'm not, I'm a feast.
                                                              (217)

I also realized that the women who wished "to be naked too" were the female version of the discredited aristocrats and that, just in case the audience missed Fornes' critique, the Servant refers to their ridiculous behavior in her subsequent mockery of the rich. Thus, even in these early '60s plays, Fornes boldly staged sexuality and questioned conventional sexual relations while protecting her actors from gratuitous physical display. Miss Cake appears in an ample leotard and tights decorated with feathered fringe while the "naked ladies" remove only their dresses and remain in outlandishly decorated teddies, stockings, shoes, and hats.

Critics have noted that the Mother's song questions the conventional nature of Truth (e.g., Mael 189):

I have to live with my own truth.
I have to live with it.
You live with your own truth.
I cannot live with it.
I have to live with my own truth whether
  you like it or not.

I know everything. Half of it I really know.
The rest I make up. The rest I make up.
Some things I'm sure of, of other things I'm too
 sure, and of others I'm not sure at all.
                                                      (265)

But the critics do not connect the Mother's (and Fornes') understanding—that each person must make up from moment to moment a provisional version of truth and reality—with Fornes' call for people to take action, to grow and to improve their lives no matter what their material circumstances. Although Fornes does not believe that the purpose of her plays is to persuade people to take a particular course of action, her plays exhibit low-power characters' (failed or successful) attempts to create tactical spaces for change and resistance. These "demonstrations," coupled with Fornes' satirical dislodging of unconsciously held assumptions about social relations, present the possibility that elements of her plays may function as (Peircian) signs and thus affect the "experience" and "habits," or dispositions, of the audience.

Throughout the remainder of the '60s, Fornes continued to write light, often comedie social commentaries while experimenting with varying presentational modes: ritual, music hall, lecture, and film as well as vaudeville and musical theatre styles. In 1966, Jerome Robbins (co-director of the New York City Ballet, Broadway choreographer, and sometime Judson patron) backed a Broadway production of Fornes Fornes' The Office, which previewed but never opened.⁷ Frones' believes that she play this because she tried to transport characters from real life into an invented situation, a method of writing that she found more confusing than useful ("Messages" 28).

In Dr. Kheal (1967), a popular and much performed comic-didactic 'lecture,' Fornes combined the idiosyncratic wit and wordplay of Promenade with the paradoxes and teacher-student dynamics of Tango Palace. Professor Kheal, whose name synthesizes 'kill' and 'heal,' teaches that in reality such seeming opposites actually coexist:

Don't you know that you can take a yes and a no and push them together, squeeze them together, compress them so they are one? That in fact that is what reality is? Opposites, contradictions, compressed so that you don't know where one stops and the other begins?

(Dr. Kheal 72)

However, Kheal's ambiguous reality is tempered by balance, "a state of equilibrium between opposing forces," and by will:

Does the thing happen, or does one do it? … Through will… . Can I make my own life. Construct my own life? … Of course not, you fool. Of course you can.

(64)

Kheal concludes this discussion with a paradox: "Eimer you do it, or else it does itself. Life, that is. What other way is mere? None" (65).

By presenting free will and determination as binary opposites, and having her provocateur handle the resulting tension by first maintaining that you both can and cannot construct your own life and then later insisting that either you do life or life does itself, Fomes wished to question audience members' understanding of individual agency in relation to the power of social forces. It is worth remembering that during a time when many artists and young people were holding 'the Establishment' responsible for both interpersonal and international ills, Fornes held that (middle-class) individuals were in great measure responsible for their own happiness within given circumstances (Harrington 34). By taking this jestic position within a "revolutionary" movement (Shepard 32), Fornes seemed to be pointing toward a clear-eyed and unromanticized conception of the shifting and contingent power of individuals to construct a life within networks of social power. Dr. Kheal introduces this and other germinal ideas that will recur throughout Fornes' later plays, darker works in which she continues to investigate subjects-in-practice, constantly evolving subjects interacting with provisionally stable institutions as well as with other subjects-in-practice.⁸

Despite her aversion to overtly political groups and "didactic" drama, Fornes contributed two plays to the Vietnam War protests: Vietnamese Wedding (1967), a participatory theatre-style event for adults in which the audience was encouraged to humanize the 'enemy' by enacting a Vietnamese version of a familiar ritual (…) ; and the disjointed collaboration, Red Burning Light (1968, music by John Bauman).⁹ This piece combined the 1960s penchant for staging raunchy behavior (scratching, belching, humping, sticking out tongues, exposing breasts) with music hall routines, including slapstick comedy, exotic dances, ballads, chorus lines, and lots of 'sexy' jokes, in an unfocused attempt to poke fun at U.S. chauvinism, imperialism, and militarism. In a generous Village Voice review of the LaMama production, Robert Pasolli describes The Red Burning light of the American Way of Life (RBL) as a burlesque "ramble through some military and political adventures" (59). For Pasolli, the play was less about politics per se than eroticism and carnality (a frequent Fornes topic) (59). He praises the piece for subtly making the "point" that "American imperialism is an incidental form of run-away and largely impotent sexuality, [that] the proverbial red light burns at the heart of our national experience" (59). But Pasolli also remarks the "mockingly bad dirty jokes" and the "parody of Madame Butterfly in a bumps and grinds [sic] dance" without connecting them to any specific social commentary or to the Vietnamera military frame of the story. Near the end of the review, he dedicates two column inches to the performance of a "perfect dumb stripper," praising especially the actress's "young and attractive body, which most strippers lack" (59). This sexist and objectifying perspective was typical for 1969, and perhaps encouraged by Fornes' presentation of stereotypical characters such as "the sexy young lady" and "a bosomy lady general" (RBL 21). However, Pasolli's superficial reading falls disappointingly short of his trenchant explications of Fornes' other early works; but since Fornes radically revised the script before publication, I cannot fairly judge either the effectiveness of the actual performance or Pasolli's response to it.

Although the erotic dances were cut in the published version, sexual talk and raunchy behavior still dominate the text. This otherwise insignificant romp merits attention, however, for the surprising degree to which Fornes infuses biting, if inchoate, critiques of the unfounded sense of supremacy that underlies the sexual double-standard as well as U.S. assaults on 'native' populations through preaching and tourism as well as military campaigns. Fornesian ideas and images that will reappear in more polished form abound: remote bombings produce "small amounts of smoke in various places" onstage (as in The Danube) (RBL 55); the dangerous misuse of language such as parroting political double-speak, euphemisms, and even song lyrics; and the frivolity and inattention of relatively well-off characters in contrast to the hard-earned knowledge and striving of the oppressed. In the published version, two particularly chilling instances stand out: a young soldier's naive ballad about the "strange" transformation of the tropical jungle into a "flat, gray, brittle and dry" land where "breathing is rather hard," and the U.S. military's oblivious repetition of Kooly-Kooly's song:

I coom flom li del
To tell woo woo yell pay
Yool skin ill be toln flom yool boly
And yul ees ill be peerce and fol flum
Deil sodet.

And yul lims ill be pooty of blud and bown
As main wer.
Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.
Yool ill pay, if not heel in lel.
                                              (RBL 50)

I come from the dead
To tell you you will pay.
Your skin will be torn from your body,
And your eyes will be peirced,
And fall from their sockets.

And your limbs will be putty of blood and bone.
As mine were.
Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.
You will pay, if not here, in hell.
                                                    (52)

As in much of Fornes' work, these songs warn oppressors and their compliant or complicit followers that they are not immune from the adverse effects of their destructive, thoughtless, and chauvinist beliefs and behaviors. Even in this flawed experimental work, Fornes manages to stir up the ambivalence and ambiguities that blur the necessarily contextual boundaries between sexy and sexist, civilization and barbarism, liberation and re-inscription.

In Molly's Dream (1968, music by Cosmos Savage), a lonely barmaid falls asleep while reading a romantic Western. She dreams of encounters between herself and Jim, a man draped with previous female admirers, and between John (Wayne) and Shirley Temple-like Alberta. Unwilling to become part of Jim's harem, even though "it felt right to be near him," Molly adopts a jaded, wiser, and unhurtable Marlene Dietrich persona (Molly 93). After watching the other characters try on a series of rigidly gendered movie roles—dispassionate macho man, well-hung (with holsters) gunslinger, Dracula, Superman, baby doll, and perfect bride and groom—Molly drops the Dietrich and explains to Jim that "in order to become what we are, we have to go through many stages" (123).

In Molly's Dream, Fornes manages to share her fascination with romance and at the same time critique role-playing and the movie images mat shape and limit expressions of desire. She parodies naturalized representations of masculine rivalry and sex appeal and of females as victims, children, or concubines. Fornes usefully complicates Molly's reaction to reading a love story: rather than simply providing emotional escape from loneliness and boredom, the story provokes Molly's psychic journey from sexual attraction, through heartbreak and feigned indifference, to acknowledgment and restraint of this particular desire since its satisfaction would cost her autonomy and individuality. Perhaps Fornes was ahead of her time in exploring the complexities of how women identify with film, theatre, and fiction (key issues for feminist critics of the late 1980s), for the play was deemed too "romantic" by some feminist standards in 1968.¹⁰

Fornes explained this potential contradiction to interviewer Scott Cummings in the context of some (radical) feminists' rejection of (heterosexual) romance.

I remember having what became almost an argument with a friend of mine who is very political … about Molly's Dream. She said it was romantic and meant it as a criticism and I said, "Yes, isn't it?" and meant it as a high compliment. I remember we were in a bar, we were drinking beer, and I said, "Have you ever been with a person when just being with them makes you see everything in a different light. A glass of beer has an amber, a yellow that you've never seen before and it seems to shine in a manner that is—" and she said, "Yes!" and I said, "That is romantic! That is romance!" and she said, "Well, in that case.… " I said, "It is more beautiful. It isn't that you want it to be more beautiful or that you are lying to yourself. It is. Your senses are sharpened."

(in Cummings 55)

In response to Cummings' comment that "there is a power in that feeling that can make a character do things mat are not in his or her own best interest," Fornes replied, "Romance is romance. It's like intelligence. Now you can say that some people are so intelligent that sometimes they become too mental and brainy and it leads to their destruction" (55). In these comments, Fornes defends her attempt to separate for herself and for her audience general concepts from how they function in particular contexts. As Helene Keyssar pointed out, in Molly's Dream Fornes both celebrates Molly's enlivened senses and sensibilities and critiques cinematic depictions of romantic relationships as seen through Molly's eyes, that is, from a particular female character's perspective.

From an historical perspective, one can see that Molly's Dream combines Fornes' early parodic style with harbingers of the more serious treatment of gender and other inegalitarian social relations in her later plays. For example, the zany filmic context of The Successful Life of 3 with its broadly satiric swipes at two-dimensional B-movie characters is toned down in Molly; the fictional roles are separated from the protagonist's 'real life,' held up for scrutiny, and criticized for meir negative influence on gender relations. Molly's self-discoveries are clearer and deeper than the muted changes in consciousness exhibited by She, but less profound than the painful and poignant insights grasped by female characters in Fefu and Mud. Molly was also the first published Fornes play since The Widow (1961) to center on a female protagonist; in all her later plays, the central protagonist(s) would be female (and sometimes also male) characters.

Feminist critics in the early 1980s who liked the play tended either to simplify Fornes' exploration of gender roles (Keyssar 122) or to assume that because Molly is still dreaming when Jim comes back that she has missed her chance for true love (Mael 190). They fail to note, however, that Jim returns draped with luggage "which resembles in color the Hanging Women's costumes" (Molly 124). No Prince Charming, Jim hesitates in the doorway, laden with baggage from old relationships, while Molly tries on and then discards conventional (and ultimately unsatisfactory) subject positions in her dreams. More interesting from a theoretical point of view is Fornes' placement of Molly in a dream state or, to use Lisa Ruddick's term, a liminal or "transitional" space (Ruddick 3-4), a time and place reserved for the playful experimentation necessary to develop a strong and evolving sense of self, a space usually denied women by meir gendered roles as sex objects and caregivers.¹¹ Turning her magical-realist respect for psychic events to feminist account, Fornes arranges for Molly to raise her (feminist) consciousness by making use of the relative freedom of a subconscious dream state.

Like her protagonists, Fornes used the experimental venues of the 1960s as a "creative play space" in which to experiment with a range of production (and producing) styles, and to learn the crafts of theatre by practicing them. Although Molly's Dream (in 1968) was her last published play until 1977, Fornes continued to work in the theatre, as a director and producer as well as playwright.

Playwright/Director

When Molly's Dream was first produced "in an elaborately directed reading" for a Tanglewood writing workshop, Fornes had wanted to direct her own project. She reluctantly acquiesced when Robert Lewis (workshop leader and prestigious Broadway director) insisted that only "directors will direct" (in Savran 59). Fornes chose Ed Setrakian as her director because she knew and liked him as an actor; but when he began "making [the play] too abstract … [and] asking people to do this bizarre behavior," she complained to Lewis. Rather than being allowed to take over the direction, Fornes was forced to ask the director to do what she wanted.

So Ed did what I asked and then he said to me, "I haven't been able to sleep because of what you're doing to me." … And I said, "Ed, I'd rather you don't sleep than I don't sleep." … But that situation taught me never again to give in. I didn't want to make Ed not sleep. I wanted to do it myself. If then it doesn't come out right, I did it wrong and nobody else has to suffer. I promised myself that I wasn't going to let anyone else direct my work. And I didn't care if it never got done again.

(59-60)

Later in 1968, when New Dramatists offered Fornes a second production of Molly's Dream, she threatened to quit the playwrights' organization if they would not support her need as a playwright to direct her own work. They made an exception and from that production on, Fornes has directed the first and, whenever possible, the second and third productions of her new scripts.

In retrospect, Fornes recalls

I never saw any difference between writing and directing.… Of course, they are different things, but they are sequentially and directly connected. So that to me rehearsing was just the next step [in writing a play]. To continue working on it was natural.

(in Cummings 52)

However, for a playwright to direct her own plays or for a woman to direct at all is still not considered "natural" in professional theatre. In addition to crossing the gender-marked division between 'feminine' playwriting and 'masculine' directing, Fornes also challenged producers' 'traditional wisdom' that women directors could not command sufficient respect from and control over (predominantly male) casts and crew. Thus Fornes tends to select artistic collaborators who already believe in her work (such as Anne Militello, who has lit more than ten Fornes productions). In such a positive atmosphere, Fornes claims that she often wields "a power that is almost hypnotic" (160). During my observation of her directing at Trinity Rep in 1989-1990, Fornes commanded the respect due a seasoned director as well as the rapt attention due an indisputable authority on the enigmatic sensibility of her plays.

Since making it a practice to direct her own new plays, Fornes claims that she has never finished a script prior to rehearsal. (She began rehearsals for Eyes on the Harem [1978], which garnered an Obie for direction, with only three pages of finished dialogue [in Savran, 60]). She uses the rehearsal time to try out preliminary or even "extra" scenes with actors as part of the writing/editing process. Fornes' technique of seeing characters and hearing dialogue in action before a script is finalized contributes to the imagistic theatricality of her scripts. Directing also allows her to strengthen a play's structure so that it can withstand the multiple interpretations of directors, actors, designers, and audiences in subsequent productions (in Betsko 158). In addition to these aesthetic reasons, Fornes' insistence on directing was also the move of a woman writer taking over the next step in the production of meaning, as well as the means of production.

Playwright/Producer

By the end of the 1960s, the wide-open experimental theatre environment began to change. Fornes notes, "by '68 already the directors [e.g., Chaikin, Richard Schechner, and Tom O'Horgan] had taken over. Most of the playwrights who were active in the early years of the off-off-Broadway movement became sort of outcasts" (in Cummings 53). Women playwrights, in particular, found that they were required to make "horrible compromises to get produced" or that in the hands of some directors their plays were transformed into "vehicle[s] for feminine violation" (Megan Terry; Rosalyn Drexler, in Gussow 44). In 1972, Fornes joined with other avant-garde women playwrights (Terry, Drexler, Julie Bovasso, Adrienne Kennedy, and Rochelle Owens) to form the Women's Theater Council (WTC), a cooperative theatre to produce women's work. Fornes explained in an New York Times article about the establishment of the WTC that "Men are writing out of their dreams. Ours are feminine dreams. Now we can say yes, we are women" (in Gussow 44).

But no one would fund the Women's Theater Council because they "had no track record" (Terry, in Betsko 385), even though all six women had been produced and reviewed throughout the 1960s and five had won Obies for playwriting. Undaunted, they joined forces with a number of male playwrights, including Ed Bullins and Sam Shepard (Keyssar 21), and formed the New York Theater Strategy (1972-1979), which Fornes ran (almost single-handedly) for five of its six years. Theater Strategy shared the virtues and vices of 1960s off-off-Broadway venues which allowed playwrights to set their own pace, to test ideas without inordinate worries about pleasing the audience, and "to be involved with [their own] work—and that of others twenty-four hours a day" (Paul Foster, in Bigsby 26). At the time, running Theater Strategy "twenty-four hours a day" suited Fornes' idiosyncratic, do-it-yourself methods and gave her an opportunity to learn every aspect of avant-garde theatre on the job and to work on numerous productions of new plays. Not until 1977 after directing and producing her own new play Fefu and Her Friends, did she hire managerial help and begin her current prolific period of writing.

Changing Writing Style

The years 1969-1977 were a relatively fallow period for Fornes as a playwright. Although the heavy production schedule at the New York Theater Strategy pre-empted full-time writing, Fornes also felt that with Aurora (unpublished, produced 1973), and even with Molly's Dream, that she had begun to repeat herself, and so during the early 1970s, she worked to change her writing style, the hardest and "most important thing for a writer to do" (in Cummings 54).

Writing Tango Palace had been an exhilarating but "very passionate" experience, a spontaneous burst of creativity that 'took possession' of Fornes (in Savran 59). This spontaneity produced a surprisingly good first play but provided Fornes with no techniques for writing "painful things without going through the agony [her] self or for accessing her creativity at will (in Savran 59). This explains the rather abrupt change in tone from Tango's dark psychological probing to the lighter satire of her other early plays, "I started to write things that were lighter because I just didn't want to suffer" (59). Throughout the 1960s, she experimented with games and exercises in order "to find ways to be possessed again" (58). Sometimes she "found that it was possible to be caught up in a kind of writing where the characters take over, [where] it's fluid and fast and interesting" (in Savran 58); but at other times, she procrastinated, rearranging her silverware, starching her jeans, doing anything to avoid writing (Fornes, "Messages" 40).

While managing Theater Strategy and helping other playwrights, casts, and directors solve creative problems, Fornes continued to lead writing workshops for which she devised yoga- and visualization-based warmups and adapted Method and improvisational acting techniques for use in writing plays. During this time, she came to believe that playwrights, like actors, could "gain an enormous depth by going to the past, to the future, to other times that are between [those] scenes" actually included in the final script (in Cummings 53-54). In her own work, Fornes uses the "extra" scenes produced through this research method to enrich her characters' often brief appearances onstage and to 'instantly' revise scripts in rehearsal. (During rehearsal for Night, I noted that Fornes was able to add, cut, or rearrange speeches and scenes during the actors' rest breaks.)

These techniques, in conjunction with staging preliminary (written) text as part of the writing process (which allows experimentation with the visual, aural, and relational dimensions that actors provide), enable Fornes to identify areas to be clarified and/or text to be pared away. Watching the script in performance greatly facilitates Fornes' aim to circumvent easy catharsis or closure and allows her to delete lines and actions that undercut her vision of the contradictory, ambiguous nature of human realities. From these writing experiments in the 1960s and '70s, Fornes developed a two-phase writing process: an initial 'additive' stage which invites creativity and admits irrational ideas and images, followed by a 'subtractive' phase during which she analyzes and edits (both on paper and on stage) selections from a rich repository of relevant material. Fefu and Her Friends (1977) was the first product of her changing writing/directing process.

By the time Fornes returned to full-time authorshiip with Fefu (1977), she had experimented with many forms and styles in a variety of '60s venues and gained valuable production experience while managing the New York Theater Strategy. As a 'convert' to theatre at age thirty, Fornes set out to learn all the crafts of her new field, meanwhile producing significant experimental works. Beginning with Fefu, Fornes shifted from free-wheeling satires of character types and forms of entertainment, to studies of rounder characters in more particularized, real world contexts. Yet, as we will see, she retained her fascination with the irrational and the unconscious elements of human experience, elements to which she maintained access through her increasingly controllable creative process.

Notes

¹Ulysses in Nighttown, dramatized and adapted by Marjorie Barkenton under supervision of Padraic Colum (New York: Random House, 1958).

²Fornes says of her early relationship with Sontag:

We exchanged ideas compulsively. I wasn't a reader, and culture isn't something about which you can say, okay, I'm going to get some now. So I couldn't go to her, she had to come to me. We were always talking.

(in Harrington 34)

³ In Promenade, a maidservant mocks the inanity and disconnection of aristocratic chatter, and more trenchantly, in Night, mentally unbalanced but oddly perspicacious Helena asserts that when people use "false words which have nothing behind them … they feel a little cheated later, debilitated. If you use words without meaning, you feel debilitated" (Night, "Lust" 13).

⁴In addition to Tango Palace, Fefu in Fefu and Her Friends, Leticia in The Conduct of Life, Lloyd in Mud, Joseph in Night, and half-seriously 3 in The Successful Life; also, Sarita in Sarita and Nadine in Night attack their oppressors with a knife.

⁵See Ruddick section of Chapter 2 for a discussion of the importance of creative play in self-development.

⁶For my discussion of Bourdieu's definition of habitus and related concepts, see Chapter 1.

⁷The manuscript is unavailable since Fornes never finished the script to her satisfaction.

⁸For a discussion of 'subjects-in-practice,' see the Gardiner section of Chapter 1.

⁹The original production of The Red Burning Light Or: Mission XQ3, was directed by Fredric de Boer and choreographed by James Barbosa for the Open Theatre's 1968 European tour. By the second production (at LaMama E.T.C, in New York), the show had gained three more director/choreographers including Fornes and Judson colleague Remy Charlip and a second composer, Richard Peaslee.

¹⁰A noteworthy exception is Phyllis Mael's 1981 explication of Molly's Dream which anticipates poststructuralist theories about the workings of cinema by remarking Fornes' exploration of cinema's (and theatre's) influence on people's dreams and fantasies.

¹¹For an introductory discussion of "transitional space" and "self-creating play," see the Ruddick section of Chapter 2.

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